Four against darkness pdf free download

Are they accurately quoted, and have any changes and omissions been indicated with brackets and ellipses? Does each part relate to the thesis? If so, are they clearly labeled with captions? If you did not create them yourself, have you cited your sources? Where might they need more information or guidance? What does it leave readers thinking?

How else might the text end? Does it announce your topic and give some sense of what you have to say? Start with global whole-text issues, and gradually move to smaller, sentence-level details. Set deadlines that will give you plenty of time to work on your revision. Try to get some distance. If you can, step away from your writing for a while and think about something else. Does each paragraph contribute to your main point? Does your beginning introduce your topic and provide any necessary contextual information?

Does your ending provide a satisfying conclusion? Make sure that all your key ideas are fully explained. If you add evidence, make sure that it all supports your point and includes any needed documentation.

You may find it helpful to outline your draft to see all the parts readily. Look closely at your title to be sure it gives a sense of what your text is about. The following guidelines can help you check the paragraphs, sentences, and words in your drafts. Does every sentence in the paragraph relate to that point? Does each one follow smoothly from the one before it? Do you need to add transitions? How else might you begin?

How else might you conclude? Sometimes these words help introduce a topic, but often they make a text vague. For example, do you need to replace verbs like be or do with more specific verbs? Your writing will almost always be better without such predictable expressions. Proofreading This is the final stage of the writing process, the point when you check for misspelled words, mixed-up fonts, missing pages, and so on.

Use your finger or a pencil as a pointer. Ask someone else to read your text. Here are some guidelines for collaborating successfully. This is especially important when collaborating online. Without tone of voice, facial expressions, and other body language, your words carry all the weight. Remember also that what you write may be forwarded to others. Group members may not all have access to the same equipment and software. Name files carefully. Appoint one person as timekeeper and another person as group leader; a third member should keep a record of the discussion and write a summary afterward.

Here one writer recalls when he first understood what a paragraph does. The words themselves were mostly foreign, but I still remember the exact moment when I first understood, with a sudden clarity, the purpose of a paragraph. The words inside a paragraph worked together for a common purpose.

They had some specific reason for being inside the same fence. It offers tips and examples for composing strong paragraphs. There is, of course, nothing naturally abhorrent in the human impulse to dwell in marketplaces or the urge to buy, sell, and trade. Rural Americans traditionally looked forward to the excitement and sensuality of market day; Native Americans traveled long distances to barter and trade at sprawling, festive encampments.

In Persian bazaars and in the ancient Greek agoras the very soul of the community was preserved and could be seen, felt, heard, and smelled as it might be nowhere else. Often, but not always, you might start a paragraph with a topic sentence, as in this example from an essay about legalizing the sale of human kidneys. Dialysis is harsh, expensive, and, worst of all, only temporary. Acting as an artificial kidney, dialysis mechanically filters the blood of a patient.

It works, but not well. With treatment sessions lasting three hours, several times a week, those dependent on dialysis are, in a sense, shackled to a machine for the rest of their lives. Adding excessive stress to the body, dialysis causes patients to feel increasingly faint and tired, usually keeping them from work and other normal activities.

See how this strategy works in another paragraph in the essay about kidneys. In a legal kidney transplant, everybody gains except the donor. The doctors and nurses are paid for the operation, the patient receives a new kidney, but the donor receives nothing.

Sure, the donor will have the warm, uplifting feeling associated with helping a fellow human being, but this is not enough reward for most people to part with a piece of themselves. In an ideal world, the average person would be altruistic enough to donate a kidney with nothing expected in return. The real world, however, is run by money.

We pay men for donating sperm, and we pay women for donating ova, yet we expect others to give away an entire organ with no compensation. If the sale of organs were allowed, people would have a greater incentive to help save the life of a stranger.

I came to the United States in at age 3 with my family and immediately stopped speaking Spanish. Whether or not you announce the main point in a topic sentence, be sure that every sentence in a paragraph relates to that point. Edit out any sentences that stray off topic, such as those crossed out below. Previous generations of immigrants were encouraged to speak only English. When someone poses a question to her in Spanish, she often has to respond in English.

In other instances, she tries to speak Spanish but falters over the past and future tenses. Situations like these embarrass Barrientos and make her feel left out of a community she wants to be part of. Native Guatemalans who are bilingual do not have such problems.

Analyzing cause and effect. The following paragraph about air turbulence identifies some of its causes. A variety of factors can cause turbulence, which is essentially a disturbance in the movement of air. See how two social scientists use classification to explain the ways that various types of social network websites SNSs make user profiles visible.

The visibility of a profile varies by site and according to user discretion. By default, profiles on Friendster and Tribe. Alternatively, LinkedIn controls what a viewer might see based on whether she or he has a paid account. Structural variations around visibility and access are one of the primary ways that SNSs differentiate themselves from each other.

See how the following paragraph divides the concept of pressure into four kinds. I see four kinds of pressure working on college students today: economic pressure, parental pressure, peer pressure, and selfinduced pressure. But there are no villains; only victims.

One is to shift back and forth between each item point by point, as in this paragraph contrasting the attention given to a football team and to academic teams. The football players enjoyed the attentions of an enthralled school, complete with banners, assemblies, and even video announcements in their honor, a virtual barrage of praise and downright deification.

As for the three champion academic teams, they received a combined total of around ten minutes of recognition, tacked onto the beginning of a sports assembly. After all, why should they?

See how this approach works in the following example, which contrasts photographs of Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton on the opening day of the baseball season. The next day photos of the Clintons in action appeared in newspapers around the country. The one of Bill Clinton showed him wearing an Indians cap and warm-up jacket. The President, throwing lefty, had turned his shoulders sideways to the plate in preparation for delivery. He was bringing the ball forward from behind his head in a clean-looking throwing action as the photo was snapped.

In preparation for her throw she was standing directly facing the plate. A right-hander, she had the elbow of her throwing arm pointed out in front of her. Her forearm was tilted back, toward her shoulder.

The ball rested on her upturned palm. As the picture was taken, she was in the middle of an action that can only be described as throwing like a girl. See how one writer uses analogy to explain the way DNA encodes genetic information. Although the complexity of cells, tissues, and whole organisms is breathtaking, the way in which the basic DNA instructions are written is astonishingly simple. Like more familiar instruction systems such as language, numbers, or computer binary code, what matters is not so much the symbols themselves but the order in which they appear.

In exactly the same way the order of the four chemical symbols in DNA embodies the message. The following paragraph provides brief definitions of three tropical fruits. I walked onto a patio speckled with dark stains, as if the heavens had been spitting down on it.

I looked up; there were the two trees responsible. One was a lollipop mango tree. The other was a nispero tree. Beyond the patio, I saw a mammee tree, which bears large, football-shaped fruit. Here a paragraph weaves together details of background, appearance, and speech to create a vivid impression of Chuck Yeager, the first pilot to break the sound barrier. His father was a gas driller drilling for natural gas in the coalfields , his older brother was a gas driller, and he would have been a gas driller had he not enlisted in the Army Air Force in at the age of eighteen.

In , at twenty, he became a flight officer, i. Even in the tumult of the war Yeager was somewhat puzzling to a lot of other pilots. What was puzzling was the way Yeager talked. He seemed to talk with some older forms of English elocution, syntax, and conjugation that had been preserved uphollow in the Appalachians. Cookbooks explain many processes step-by-step, as in this explanation of how to pit a mango.

The simplest method for pitting a mango is to hold it horizontally, then cut it in two lengthwise, slightly off-center, so the knife just misses the pit. Repeat the cut on the other side so a thin layer of flesh remains around the flat pit. Holding a half, flesh-side up, in the palm of your hand, slash the flesh into a lattice, cutting down to, but not through, the peel. Carefully push the center of the peel upward with your thumbs to turn it inside out, opening the cuts of the flesh.

Then cut the mango cubes from the peel. One such incident that has stayed with me, though I recognize it as a minor offense, happened on the day of my first public poetry reading. It took place in Miami in a boat-restaurant where we were having lunch before the event. I was nervous and excited as I walked in with my notebook in my hand.

An older woman motioned me to her table. Thinking foolish me that she wanted me to autograph a copy of my brand-new slender volume of verse, I went over.

She ordered a cup of coffee from me, assuming that I was the waitress. Easy enough to mistake my poems for menus, I suppose. We shook hands at the end of the reading, and I never saw her again. She has probably forgotten the whole thing but maybe not. Illustrating a point with one or more examples is a common way to develop a paragraph, like the following one, which uses lyrics as examples to make a point about the similarities between two types of music.

On a happier note, both rap and [country-and-western] feature strong female voices as well. Repetition, parallelism, and transitions are three strategies for making paragraphs flow. One way to help readers follow your train of thought is to repeat key words and phrases, as well as pronouns referring to those key words. Not that long ago, blogs were one of those annoying buzz words that you could safely get away with ignoring. Unlike a big media outlet, bloggers focus their efforts on narrow topics, often rising to become de facto watchdogs and self-proclaimed experts.

Blogs can be about anything: politics, sex, baseball, haiku, car repair. There are blogs about blogs. Predictably, the love of cinema has waned. And wonderful films are still being made. The disease was bubonic plague, present in two forms: one that infected the bloodstream, causing the buboes and internal bleeding and was spread by contact; and a second, more virulent pneumonic type that infected the lungs and was spread by respiratory infection.

The presence of both at once caused the high mortality and speed of contagion. Yolanda, the third of the four girls, became a schoolteacher but not on purpose. For years after graduate school, she wrote down poet under profession in questionnaires and income tax forms, and later amended it to writer-slash-teacher. Today the used-book market is exceedingly well organized and efficient. Campus bookstores buy back not only the books that will be used at their university the next semester but also those that will not.

Those that are no longer on their lists of required books they resell to national wholesalers, which in turn sell them to college bookstores on campuses where they will be required. This means that even if a text is being adopted for the first time at a particular college, there is almost certain to be an ample supply of used copies.

But while a brief, one- or two-sentence paragraph can be used to set off an idea you want to emphasize, too many short paragraphs can make your writing choppy. Opening paragraphs. In the following opening paragraph, the writer begins with a generalization about academic architecture, then ends with a specific thesis stating what the rest of the essay will argue. Academic architecture invariably projects an identity about campus and community to building users and to the world beyond.

Yet in other cases, the architectural language established in surrounding precedents may be more appropriate, even for high-tech facilities. The bottom line is that drastically reducing both crime rates and the number of people behind bars is technically feasible. Whether it is politically and organizationally feasible to achieve this remains an open question.

Sometimes you can rely on established design conventions: in academic writing, there are specific guidelines for headings, margins, and line spacing. No matter what your text includes, its design will influence how your audience responds to it and therefore how well it achieves your purpose. To keep readers oriented as they browse multipage documents or websites, use design elements consistently.

In a print academic essay, choose a single font for your main text and use boldface or italics for headings. In writing for the web, place navigation buttons and other major elements in the same place on every page. Keep it simple. Resist the temptation to fill pages with unnecessary graphics or animations. Aim for balance. Create balance through the use of margins, images, headings, and spacing. Use color and contrast carefully. Academic readers usually expect black text on a white background, with perhaps one other color for headings.

Make sure your audience will be able to distinguish any color variations in your text well enough to grasp your meaning. Use available templates. To save time and simplify design decisions, take advantage of templates. In Microsoft Word, for example, you can customize font, spacing, indents, and other features that will automatically be applied to your document.

Websites that host personal webpages and presentation software also offer templates that you can use or modify. The following guidelines will help you make those decisions. The fonts you choose will affect how well readers can read your text.

Decorative fonts such as should be used sparingly. If you use more than one font, use each one consistently: one for headings, one for captions, one for the main body of your text. Every common font has regular, bold, and italic forms. Layout is the way text is arranged on a page. An academic essay, for example, will usually have a title centered at the top and one-inch margins all around.

Items such as lists, tables, headings, and images should be arranged consistently. Line spacing. In general, indent paragraphs five spaces when your text is double-spaced; either indent or skip a line between paragraphs that are single-spaced. When preparing a text intended for online use, single-space your document, skip a line between paragraphs, and begin each paragraph flush left no indent.

Use a list format for information that you want to set off and make easily accessible. Number the items when the sequence matters in instructions, for example ; use bullets when the order is not important.

Set off lists with an extra line of space above and below, and add extra space between the items on a list if necessary for legibility. White space and margins. To make your text attractive and readable, use white space to separate its various parts. In general, use one-inch margins for the text of an essay or report. Headings make the structure of a text easier to follow and help readers find specific information.

Whenever you include headings, you need to decide how to phrase them, what fonts to use, and where to position them. Phrase headings consistently. Make your headings succinct and parallel in structure.

Whatever form you decide on, use it consistently. Make headings visible. Position headings appropriately. If you are not following a prescribed format, you get to decide where to position the headings: centered, flush with the left margin, or even alongside the text, in a wide lefthand margin.

Position each level of head consistently. In print documents, you can often use photos, charts, graphs, and diagrams. Online or in spoken presentations, your options expand to include video and printed handouts. A discussion of Google Glass might be clearer when accompanied by this photo. Tables are useful for displaying numerical information concisely, especially when several items are being compared. Presenting information in columns and rows permits readers to find data and identify relationships among the items.

Pie charts can be used to show how a whole is divided into parts or how parts of a whole relate to one another. Percentages in a pie chart should always add up to Plotting the lines together enables readers to compare the data at different points in time.

Be sure to label the x and y axes and limit the number of lines to four at the most. Some software offers 3-D and other special effects, but simple graphs are often easier to read. Diagrams and flowcharts are ways of showing relationships and processes. This diagram shows how carbon moves between the Earth and its atmosphere. Flowcharts can be made by using widely available templates; diagrams, on the other hand, can range from simple drawings to works of art.

Avoid clip art. Position images as close as possible to the relevant discussion. Italian Economic Growth Rate, — If you use data to create a graph or chart, include source information directly below. Large files may be hard to upload without altering quality and can clog email inboxes. Linking also allows readers to see the original context. To include your own video, upload it to YouTube; choose the Private setting to limit access.

Be sure to represent the original content accurately, and provide relevant information about the source. Whatever the occasion, you need to make your points clear and memorable. This chapter offers guidelines to help you prepare and deliver effective presentations. Spoken texts need a clear organization so that your audience can follow you. The beginning needs to engage their interest, make clear what you will talk about, and perhaps forecast the central points of your talk. The ending should leave your audience something to remember, think about, or do.

In the Gettysburg Address, Abraham Lincoln follows a chronological structure. A tone to suit the occasion. In a presentation to a panel of professors, you probably would want to avoid too much slang and speak in complete sentences. Slides and other media. Organize and draft your presentation. If in drafting you find you have too many points for the time available, leave out the less important ones. Thank your listeners, and offer to take questions and comments if the format allows. Consider whether to use visuals.

Remember, though, that visuals should be a means of conveying information, not mere decoration. You then offer only a brief introduction and answer questions. What visual tools if any you decide to use is partly determined by how your presentation will be delivered: face to face? You may also have to move furniture or the screen to make sure everyone can see your visuals. Finally, have a backup plan. Computers fail; the internet may not work. Have an alternative in case of problems.

Presentation software. Here are some tips for writing and designing slides. Use slides to emphasize your main points, not to reproduce your talk. A list of brief points, presented one by one, reinforces your words; charts and images can provide additional information that the audience can take in quickly. On slides, sans serif fonts like Arial and Helvetica are easier to read than serif fonts like Times New Roman.

Your text and illustrations need to contrast with the background. Dark content on a light background is easier to see and read than the reverse. Decorative backgrounds, letters that fade in and out or dance across the screen, and sound effects can be more distracting than helpful; use them only if they help to make your point. Indicate in your notes each place where you need to advance to the next slide.

Label handouts with your name and the date and title of the presentation. Practice, practice, and then practice some more. Your audience will respond positively to that confidence. If possible, practice with a small group of friends to get used to having an audience.

Speak clearly. Pause for emphasis. In writing, you have white space and punctuation to show readers where an idea or discussion ends. Stand up or sit up straight, and look at your audience. Use gestures for emphasis. To overcome any nervousness and stiffness, take some deep breaths, try to relax, and move your arms and the rest of your body as you would if you were talking to a friend. To read an example presentation, go to digital. This chapter provides a description of the key elements of an essay that argues a position and tips for writing one.

To be arguable, a position must reflect one of at least two points of view, making reasoned argument necessary: file sharing should or should not be considered fair use; selling human organs should be legal or illegal.

Necessary background information. Sometimes, we need to provide some background on a topic so that readers can understand what is being argued. To argue that file sharing should be considered fair use, for example, you might begin by describing the rise in file sharing and explaining fair-use laws. Good reasons. By itself, a position does not make an argument; the argument comes when a writer offers reasons to support the position. You might base an argument in favor of legalizing the sale of human organs on the fact that transplants save lives and that regulation would protect impoverished people who currently sell their organs on the black market.

Convincing evidence. For example, to support your position that fast food should be taxed, you might cite a nutrition expert who links obesity to fast food, offer facts that demonstrate the health-care costs of widespread obesity, and provide statistics that show how taxation affects behavior. Careful consideration of other positions. No matter how reasonable you are in arguing your position, others may disagree or hold other positions. Widely debated topics such as animal rights or gun control can be difficult to write on if you have no personal connection to them.

Better topics include those that interest you right now, are focused, and have some personal connection to your life. Identify issues that interest you.

Pick a few of the roles you list, and identify the issues that interest or concern you. Try wording each issue as a question starting with should: Should college cost less than it does? Should student achievement be measured by standardized tests? What would be better than standardized tests for measuring student achievement? This strategy will help you think about the issue and find a clear focus for your essay. Choose one issue to write about. Generating ideas and text.

Most essays that successfully argue a position share certain features that make them interesting and persuasive. Consider what interests you about the topic and what more you may need to learn in order to write about it. It may help to do some preliminary research; start with one general source of information a news magazine or Wikipedia, for example to find out the main questions raised about your issue and to get some ideas about how you might argue it.

There are various ways to qualify your thesis: in certain circumstances, under certain conditions, with these limitations, and so on. You need to convince your readers that your thesis is plausible. Start by stating your position and then answering the question why?

This analysis can continue indefinitely as the underlying reasons grow more and more general and abstract. Identify other positions. Think about positions that differ from yours and about the reasons that might be given for those positions.

To refute other positions, state them as clearly and as fairly as you can, and then show why you believe they are wrong. Perhaps the reasoning is faulty or the supporting evidence is inadequate. Acknowledge their merits, if any, but emphasize their shortcomings. Ways of organizing an argument. Alternatively, you might discuss each reason and any counterargument to it together. And be sure to consider the order in which you discuss your reasons.

Usually, what comes last makes the strongest impression on readers, and what comes in the middle makes the weakest impression. End with Give the a call to second action, a reason, with support. To read an example argument essay, go to digital. This chapter describes the key elements of an essay that analyzes a text and provides tips for writing one. Your readers may not know the text you are analyzing, so you need to include it or tell them about it before you can analyze it.

Attention to the context. All texts are part of ongoing conversations, controversies, or debates, so to understand a text, you need to understand its larger context. To analyze the lyrics of a new hip-hop song, you might need to introduce other artists that the lyrics refer to or explain how the lyrics relate to aspects of hip-hop culture. A clear interpretation or judgment. When you interpret something, you explain what you think it means.

In an analysis of a cologne advertisement, you might explain how the ad encourages consumers to objectify themselves. Reasonable support for your conclusions.

You might support your interpretation by quoting passages from a written text or referring to images in a visual text. Most of the time, you will be assigned a text or a type of text to analyze: the work of a political philosopher in a political science class, a speech in a history or communications course, a painting or sculpture in an art class, and so on. You might also analyze three or four texts by examining elements common to all.

In analyzing a text, your goal is to understand what it says, how it works, and what it means. To do so, you may find it helpful to follow a certain sequence for your analysis: read, respond, summarize, analyze, and draw conclusions. Read to see what the text says. Start by reading carefully, noting the main ideas, key words and phrases, and anything that seems noteworthy or questionable. Do you find the text difficult? Do you agree with what the writer says?

Decide what you want to analyze. Think about what you find most interesting about the text and why. Does the language interest you? You might begin your analysis by exploring what attracted your notice. Think about the larger context. All texts are part of larger conversations, and academic texts include documentation partly to weave in voices from the conversation.

Does he or she respond to something others have said? Is there any terminology that suggests that he or she is allied with a particular intellectual school or academic discipline? Words like false consciousness or hegemony, for instance, would suggest that the text was written by a Marxist scholar. Consider what you know about the writer or artist. The credentials, other work, reputation, stance, and beliefs of the person who created the text are all useful windows into understanding it.

Write a sentence or two summarizing what you know about the creator and how that information affects your understanding of the text. Visual texts might be made up of images, lines, angles, color, light and shadow, and sometimes words.

Look for patterns in the way these elements are used. Write a sentence or two describing the patterns you discover and how they contribute to what the text says. Analyze the argument. What is the main point the writer is trying to make? Are the reasons plausible and sufficient? Are the arguments appropriately qualified?

How credible and current are they? After considering these questions, write a sentence or two summarizing the argument and your reactions to it. Come up with a thesis. Do you want to show that the text has a certain meaning? Your analysis might be structured in at least two ways. You might discuss patterns or themes that run through the text.

Alternatively, you might analyze each text or section of text separately. State your thesis. To read an example rhetorical analysis, go to digital.

Newspapers report on local and world events; textbooks give information about biology, history, writing; websites provide information about products jcrew. Very often this kind of writing calls for research: you need to know your subject in order to report on it.

This chapter describes the key elements found in most reports and offers tips for writing one. Accurate, well-researched information.

Reports usually require some research. The kind of research depends on the topic. Library research may be necessary for some topics—for a report on migrant laborers during the Great Depression, for example. Most current topics, however, require internet research. For a report on local farming, for example, you might interview some local farmers. Various writing strategies. For example, a report on the benefits of exercise might require that you classify types of exercise, analyze the effects of each type, and compare the benefits of each.

For a report on the financial crisis for a general audience, for example, you might need to define terms such as mortgage-backed security and predatory lending. Appropriate design. Numerical data, for instance, can be easier to understand in a table than in a paragraph. A photograph can help readers see a subject, such as an image of someone texting while driving in a report on car accidents. If you get to choose your topic, consider what interests you and what you wish you knew more about.

They may be academic in nature or reflect your personal interests, or both. Even if an assignment seems to offer little flexibility, you will need to decide how to research the topic and how to develop your report to appeal to your audience. And sometimes even narrow topics can be shaped to fit your own interests. Start with sources that can give you a general sense of the subject, such as a Wikipedia entry or an interview with an expert.

Your goal at this point is to find topics to report on and then to focus on one that you will be able to cover. Come up with a tentative thesis. Once you narrow your topic, write out a statement saying what you plan to report on or explain. Think about what kinds of information will be most informative for your audience, and be sure to consult multiple sources and perspectives.

Revisit and finalize your thesis in light of your research findings. Ways of organizing a report [Reports on topics that are unfamiliar to readers] Begin Explain by with an anecdote, quote, or other means of interesting comparing, Provide background, and state your thesis.

Describe classifying, your topic, analyzing defining causes or any key effects, terms. Conclude by restating your thesis or referring to your beginning. Conclude by topic; provide any necessary background information; state your Narrate the second event or procedure. Narrate the third event or procedure.

Repeat as necessary. Conclude by restating your Repeat as necessary. To read an example report, go to digital. Parents read their children bedtime stories as an evening ritual. Preachers base their sermons on religious stories to teach lessons about moral behavior. Grandparents tell how things used to be, sometimes telling the same stories year after year. College applicants write about significant moments in their lives. Writing students are often called on to compose narratives to explore their personal experiences.

This chapter describes the key elements of personal narratives and provides tips for writing one. Most narratives set up some sort of situation that needs to be resolved. That need for resolution makes readers want to keep reading. Vivid detail. Details can bring a narrative to life by giving readers vivid mental images of the sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and textures of the world in which your story takes place.

To give readers a picture of your childhood home in the country, you might describe the gnarled apple trees in your backyard and the sound of crickets chirping on a spring night. You may reveal its significance in various ways, but try not to state it too directly, as if it were a kind of moral of the story.

Describe the setting. List the places where your story unfolds. Think about the key people. Narratives include people whose actions play an important role in the story. Try narrating the action using active and specific verbs pondered, shouted, laughed to capture what happened. Consider the significance. You need to make clear why the event you are writing about matters. How did it change or otherwise affect you? What aspects of your life now can you trace to that event?

How might your life have been different if this event had not happened? Ways of organizing a personal narrative. Tell about what happened. Say how Say the conflict something was about the resolved. Fill in details: setting, people, specific actions.

Make clear how the situation was resolved. Say something about the significance. To read an example narrative, go to digital. In both cases, you go below the surface to deepen your understanding of how the texts work and what they mean. This chapter describes the key elements expected in most literary analyses and provides tips for writing one. Your thesis, then, should be arguable.

You might argue, for example, that the dialogue between two female characters in a short story reflects current stereotypes about gender roles. Careful attention to the language of the text. Attention to patterns or themes. Literary analyses are usually built on evidence of meaningful patterns or themes within a text or among several texts.

When you write a literary analysis, you show one way the text may be understood, using evidence from the text and, sometimes, relevant contextual evidence to support what you think the text means.

MLA style. Start by considering whether your assignment specifies a particular kind of analysis or critical approach. Look for words that say what to do: analyze, compare, interpret, and so on. Choose a method for analyzing the text. Trace the development and expression of themes, characters, and language through the work. How do they help to create particular meaning, tone, or effects?

Explore the way the text affects you as you read through it. Read closely, noticing how the elements of the text shape your responses, both intellectual and emotional. How has the author evoked your response?

Read the work more than once. When you first experience a piece of literature, you usually focus on the story, the plot, the overall meaning. Compose a strong thesis. Your goal is not to pass judgment but to suggest one way of seeing the text. Do a close reading. Find specific, brief passages that support your interpretation; then analyze those passages in terms of their language, their context, and your reaction to them as a reader.

Why does the writer choose this language, these words? What is their effect? If something is repeated, what significance does the pattern have? Support your argument with evidence. The parts of the text you examine in your close reading become the evidence you use to support your interpretation. Paying attention to matters of style. Literary analyses have certain conventions for using pronouns and verbs. Describe the historical context of the setting in the past tense.

Document your sources. To read an example literary analysis, go to digital. Lovers propose marriage; students propose that colleges provide healthier food options in campus cafeterias. These are all examples of proposals, ideas put forward that offer solutions to some problem. All proposals are arguments: when you propose something, you are trying to persuade others to consider—and hopefully to accept—your solution to the problem.

This chapter describes the key elements of a proposal and provides tips for writing one. Some problems are self-evident and relatively simple, and you would not need much persuasive power to make people act. While some might not see a problem with colleges discarding too much paper, for example, most are likely to agree that recycling is a good thing.

Other issues are more controversial: some people see them as problems while others do not. For example, some believe that motorcycle riders who do not wear helmets risk serious injury and also raise the cost of health care for all of us, but others think that wearing a helmet—or not—should be a personal choice; you would have to present arguments to convince your readers that not wearing a helmet is indeed a problem needing a solution.

A solution to the problem. Once you have defined the problem, you need to describe the solution you are suggesting and to explain it in enough detail for readers to understand what you are proposing. Sometimes you might suggest several possible solutions, analyze their merits, and then say which one you think will most likely solve the problem.

You need to provide evidence to convince readers that your solution is feasible—and that it will, in fact, solve the problem. A response to questions readers may have.

You need to consider any questions readers may have about your proposal—and to show how its advantages outweigh any disadvantages. A proposal for recycling paper, for example, would need to address questions about the costs of recycling bins and separate trash pickups.

A call to action. The goal of a proposal is to persuade readers to accept your proposed solution—and perhaps to take some kind of action. You may want to conclude your proposal by noting the outcomes likely to result from following your recommendations.

An appropriate tone. Readers will always react better to a reasonable, respectful presentation than to anger or self-righteousness. Choose a problem that can be solved. Large, complex problems such as poverty, hunger, or terrorism usually require large, complex solutions. Most of the time, focusing on a smaller problem or a limited aspect of a large problem will yield a more manageable proposal. Rather than tackling the problem of world poverty, for example, think about the problem faced by people in your community who have lost jobs and need help until they find employment.

Most successful proposals share certain features that make them persuasive. Explore several possible solutions to the problem. Decide on the most desirable solution s. One solution may be head and shoulders above others, but be open to rejecting all the possible solutions on your list and starting over if you need to, or to combining two or more potential solutions in order to come up with an acceptable fix.

Think about why your solution is the best one. What has to be done to enact it? What will it cost? What makes you think it can be done? Why will it work better than others? Ways of organizing a proposal. You can organize a proposal in various ways, but you should always begin by establishing that there is a problem.

You may then identify several possible solutions before recommending one of them or a combination of several. Sometimes, however, you might discuss only a single solution. Identify possible Propose a Call for action, solutions and solution and or reiterate consider their pros give reasons your proposed and cons one by one. Anticipate and answer questions. To read an example proposal, go to digital. Such essays are our attempt to think something through by writing about it and to share our thinking with others.

A reflective essay has a dual purpose: to ponder something you find interesting or puzzling and to share your thoughts with an audience. Whatever your subject, your goal is to explore it in a way that will interest others. One way to do that is to start by considering your own experience and then moving on to think about more universal experiences that your readers may share. For example, you might write about your dog, and in doing so you could raise questions and offer insights about the ways that people and animals interact.

Some kind of structure. A reflective essay can be organized in many ways, but it needs to have a clear structure. Whether you move from detail to detail or focus your reflection on one central question or insight about your subject, all your ideas need to relate, one way or another.

The challenge is to keep your readers interested as you explore your topic and to leave them satisfied that the journey was interesting and thought-provoking. Every now and then someone will cheer her on. Details such as these will help your readers understand and care about your subject.

A questioning, speculative tone. So your tone will often be tentative and open, demonstrating a willingness to entertain, try out, accept, and reject various ideas as your essay progresses from beginning to end, maybe even asking questions for which you can provide no direct answers. Choose a subject you want to explore. Make a list of things that you think about, wonder about, find puzzling or annoying. Explore your subject in detail.

Reflections often include descriptive details that provide a base for the speculations to come. Back away. Ask yourself why your subject matters: why is it important or intriguing or otherwise significant? Your goal is to think on screen or paper about your subject, to see where it leads you. Think about how to keep readers with you. Reflections must be carefully crafted so that readers can follow your train of thought. Ways of organizing a reflective essay. Reflections may be organized in many ways because they mimic the way we think, sometimes associating one idea with another in ways that make sense but do not necessarily follow the kinds of logical progression found in academic arguments or reports.

Here are two ways you might organize a reflection. To read an example reflective essay, go to digital. You may be assigned to create annotated bibliographies to weigh the potential usefulness of sources and to document your search efforts.

God saw that the light was good. It was day one…. God saw how sinful the earth had become. But Noah was a godly man. I am going to bring a flood that will destroy every living creature.

Bring a male and a female of every living thing into the ark. They will be kept alive with you. Take every kind of food that you will need. Noah did everything just as God commanded him…. An Israelite man and a woman from the tribe of Levi got married. She became pregnant and had a son. She saw that her baby was a fine child and hid him for three months.

So she got a basket made out of the stems of tall grass. She coated the basket with tar and placed the child in the basket. Then she put it in the tall grass that grew along the bank of the Nile River. She wanted to see what would happen to him….

You and the Israelites, leave my people! The Pharaoh and his officials soon changed their minds. As Pharaoh approached, the Israelites looked back. There were the Egyptians marching after them! The Israelites were terrified.

It would have been better for us to serve the Egyptians than to die here in the desert! There we ate all the food we wanted. But you have brought us out into this desert to die of hunger. In the morning you will be filled with bread. Then you will know that I am the Lord your God. In the morning the ground around the camp was covered with dew. When the dew was gone, thin flakes appeared on the desert floor. They looked like frost on the ground. The people of Israel saw the flakes.

The gates of Jericho were shut tight and guarded closely because of the Israelites. No one went out. No one came in. March around the city once with all your fighting men. In fact, do it for six days. They must carry them in front of the ark. On the seventh day, march around the city seven times.

Tell the priests to blow the trumpets as you march. You will hear them blow a long blast on the trumpets. When you do, tell the whole army to give a loud shout. The wall of the city will fall down….

The Philistines gathered their army together for war. Saul and the army of Israel lined up to fight against the Philistines. A champion named Goliath came out of the Philistine camp. He was over nine feet tall. But if I win and kill him, you will become our slaves.